Generation Bubble

The Culture Wars’ tawdry legacy may, like the war in Iraq, have arrived at a stage of demobilization with President Obama’s appointment of former congressman Jim Leach to the chairmanship of The National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH).

The June 28, 2009 edition of The New Times characterizes this appointment as an “instance of what may be an emerging politics of accommodation,” in which “the benefits of the center” fall to those on the left and right. This politics of accommodation has as its object government’s smooth functioning, and ensuring this function is devotion to the status quo, now not so much an ideological as an aggregate mean of opposing worldviews.

President Obama has shown himself a virtuoso in the politics of accommodation. As successive marital scandals rocked the Republican Party a few weeks ago, he stood serenely above the fray, attracting approbation usually reserved for GOP stalwarts toward his own person. “[T]he admissions of extramarital adventures by two Republican stalwarts, Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina on Wednesday and Senator John Ensign of Nevada the week before,” the Times story reports,

did not help their party’s cause and stood in dim contrast to President Obama’s recent success in co-opting parts of the conservatives’ cultural agenda — whether voicing his opposition to gay marriage, or delivering Father’s Day homilies on parenting.

Leach’s appointment to the NEH chairmanship signals yet another milestone reached on the Obama administration’s march down the political center. The Times story characterizes Leach as a Republican of the same mold as Arnold Schwarzenegger and John McCain — moderate, but with a penchant for the occasional “maverick” gesture. Leach “served in the House of Representatives for 30 years.” There he witnessed

a period in which the endowment was a major ideological battleground, with the left and right feuding over such arcane matters as college curriculums and revisionist interpretations of American history.

One need not rehearse the dreary events of that period; the scars remain. Enmity grew between hysterics in all political camps, inspired by avantgardists who refused to recognize whips and religious icons’ proper uses. These picayune antagonisms polarized universities, breeding sanctimony on the left and distrust on the right. Equal time in the classroom and David Horowitz’s (gratefully) abortive professor witch-hunt were just two of the many reactionary initiatives roiling in the Culture War’s long, turbid wake. Henry Kissinger fairly summed the situation up when he said, “University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”

Peace in our time: the smoke clears from the Culture Wars.

The days of “left and right feuding over such arcane matters as college curriculums and revisionist interpretations of American history” might now dwindle to a small few, thanks to President Obama’s appointing Leach. “Mr. Leach, though a loyal party man, nonetheless broke with conservatives by defending government support for the humanities and the arts,” the Times story reports. Leach’s is vitae which shows that discernment and principle trump party affiliation, just the right sort of bona fides for someone of Obama’s political mettle.

And Obama’s politics of accommodation must to some extent be paying off. Nary a whimper of protest was heard following the announcement of Leach’s appointment. As the Times story observes,

[t]o date, however, conservatives have been virtually silent on Mr. Leach’s appointment, evidence that on some subjects, the volume of debate has been lowered.

If Leach’s appointment to the chairmanship of the NEH indeed signals the dropping of Culture-Wars cudgels, it comes as welcome news. We at Generation Bubble believe those who hoe a narrow row should reap its meager fruit. But the problem is one of collateral damage. Latitudinarians unable to escape to friendlier environs are condemned to suffer the stupidity of the reactionary majority over them. In other words, if one gets behind some America-n’-apple-pie demagogue whose blandishments ultimately mess up her life, they not only mess up her life, but the life of her liberal neighbor’s as well.

Narrow minds should therefore always expect pushback from broader, and not because the latter are a smarter and compulsively overweening lot who relish any opportunity to micromanage other people’s lives, but because they cherish the very liberty that right-wingers believe themselves the exclusive champions of, and will move to secure those liberties by their own lights.

Unfortunately, too many parties crying, “Don’t tread on me!” brings everything to a halt. But partisan polarization plays into the right wing’s strategy of constantly provoking skirmishes to force a stalemate (Does anyone remember the swift boats and matrimony-minded gays of 2004?). Perpetuating the Culture Wars would only see to it that this Manichaean struggle will go on. It’s high time, then, for armistice.